the project seems to be on a good way. Why the particles are not visible, I don't know. Maybe there are other settings of the viewport such as clipping or level of detail that creates this issue. The mesh appearance mainly depends on the polygon size, the smoothing, and particle radius. These parameters have to be balanced, but it is not possible to just use the same numbers in each project as this also depends on the original particle resolution and how close the camera is to the mesh. I would start by setting the "smoothing" value at 0 and a slightly bigger radius. You then will notice that you may see many unwanted blobby mesh droplets appearing. After that you can work on the mesh so that it appears thinner and smoother.